Focusing on the notion of competencies, the address explores important dimensions of human infrastructure for negotiating alternative agrifood systems. The analytical competencies emphasized are those of making connections and evaluating contradictions. Farm structure and food system connections with human health and consumer culture are chosen as examples. Examined in the context of social change strategies, relational competencies focus on new forms of food citizenship involving alternative organizational relationships between farmers, retailers, and customers. Ethical competencies are framed in relationship to the (...) entire food system, to the valuing of non-market goods, and to linkages between ethics and emotions. Finally, aesthetic and spiritual competencies are considered as human capacities to connect agriculture and food with beauty and with sacramental living. (shrink)

``Civic agriculture'' identifies adiverse and growing body of food and farmingenterprises fitted to the needs of localgrowers, consumers, rural economies, andcommunities. The term lends shape andlegitimacy to development paradigms that existin opposition to the global,corporately-dominated food system. Civicagriculture also widens the scope of ag-relatedconcerns, moving away from a strictlymechanistic focus on production and capitalefficiency, and toward the more holisticreintegration of people in place. To date,researchers and practitioners have attendedclosely to the economic benefits of newmarketing arrangements and institutions (e.g.,value-added co-ops, CSAs, (...) and farmer'smarkets). Local food and farming has a criticalrole to play in the development of analternative commerce. At the same time, this isonly half the promise of civic agriculture.Civic agriculture can (and should) promotecitizenship and environmentalism within bothrural and urban settings not only throughmarket-based models of economic behavior, butthrough common ties to place and physicalengagement with that place. (shrink)

This article considers the qualitative concept of place – what it means, how it feels, how it is expressed, and how it is managed across time and space as the appropriate context within which to study and promote local agriculture and the locus of relationships, both cultural and political, that prefigure a local civic culture. It argues that civic as a description of local food and farming is conceptually and practically shallow in the absence of our ability to understand and (...) to practice “being” in place. Using three vignettes from field research in northern Michigan, the article illustrates this interdependence by focusing on the ways in which place provides opportunities for learning, for play, for engagement, for identity formation, and for explicit political and policy initiatives – as prerequisites for civic awareness and action. (shrink)